The disclosure generally relates to a web browser, and more specifically to displaying data on prior interactions of others with content items currently displayed within the browser.
When viewing content items—such as web pages or feed data, or the individual units of content within them (e.g., multimedia objects such as videos and images included within web pages, or individual feed items such as web pages or messages), or the individual units of content obtained from a service (e.g., a social networking or message posting service) via the service's API—a user may wish to know how other users of interest had previously interacted with that content. For example, a user might be more willing to examine content if it had already been viewed by several of the user's friends from a social networking service, or by people from the user's instant messaging or email contacts lists. Similarly, a user might refrain from sharing an item of content with the user's friends if those friends, or other friends, had already shared the item.
However, conventional browsers fail to provide data regarding prior interactions of the user's friends with content current displayed in the browser. Thus, unless a particular web site, such as a social networking site, has happened to explicitly include information about user interactions with a prior piece of content within the web page data that it provides to a web browser, users of the web browser have no knowledge of whether, or to what degree, their friends have already interacted with the content. Even if a particular web site does explicitly include such information, the information is limited to interactions with content of friends on that particular site, using that particular site, and does not include interactions of those friends, or other friends, with the content via another web site or service.